TO NO ONE IN PARTICULAR

Locate your love, you lose your love,
Find her, you look away;
Now mine I never quite discern,

But trace her every day.

She has a thousand presences,
As surely seen and heard
As birds that hide behind a leaf
Or leaves that hide a bird.

Single your love, you lose your love,
You cloak her face with clay;
Now mine I never quite discern—
And never look away.

AT THE TOUCH OF YOU

At the touch of you,

As if you were an archer with your swift hand at the bow, The arrows of delight shot through my body.

You were spring,

And I the edge of a cliff,

And a shining waterfall rushed over me.

THE EARTH-CLASP

Whether you fled from me not to have less

Of love but to have all without a night

The Earth-clasp

Too much, like one who moves a cup which might
Brim over with the mounting of excess,

Or whether you had felt in my caress
The fingertips of surfeit and of blight
Attempting love, or whether your quick flight\
Was to another love, I will not guess.

I touch the pillow that has touched your head,
And the brief candle that has lighted you
Sheds bleak and ashen light upon a face
As absent as the moon . . . till to replace
Your vanished arms, earth beckons me anew,
And in her clasp something of you is dead.

HE BROUGHT US CLOVER-LEAVES

He picked us clover-leaves and starry grass
And buttercups and chickweed. One by one,
Smiling he brought them. We can never pass
A roadside or a hill under the sun

Where his wee flowers will not return with him—
His little weeds and grasses, cups that brim
With sunbeams, leaves grown tender in the dew.

Come then, oh, come with us-and each in turn,
Children and elders, let us thread a few
Of all the daisies . . to enfold his urn,
And fade beside this day through which he passes
Bringing us clover-leaves and starry grasses!

WISDOM

Old man, if I only knew

A quick way to be wise like you!

Young man, this is all I know
To impart before I go:

You must keep your goal in sight
Labor toward it day and night;
Then at last arriving there-
You shall be too old to care.

You would even wiser be

Old man, were you young like me.

ECCE HOMO

Behold the man alive in me,

Behold the man in you!
If there is God-am I not he,
Shall I myself undo?

I have been waiting long enough.
Old silent gods, good-by!

I wait no more. The way is rough

But the god who climbs is I.

Witter Bynner

EDITORIAL COMMENT

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

EAD, my lords and gentlemen:
Stilled the tongue and stayed the pen;
Cheek unflushed and eye unlit-
Done with life and glad of it.
Curb your praises now as then-
Dead, my lords and gentlemen.
What he wrought found its reward
In the tolerance of the Lord.

Low he lies, yet high and great
Looms he, lying thus in state:
How exalted o'er ye when
Dead, my lords and gentlemen.

K

J. W. R.

Riley was one of the poets of power in that it was given to him to "tell the tale of the tribe." He was keen enough in imagination, fine enough in sympathy, and creative enough in art, to apprehend his fellow-countryman and fix his type. He arrived during his life at this high distinction—that he speaks for Indiana, and Indiana is what he made it. Still more, he has widened the bounds of Indiana, made it absorb its middle-western neighbors to right and left so far as their country people and village people are true to his type. And be made the world love his Indiana-his cheerful, whimsical, unassuming, shrewd and sentimental neighbors, the democratic people of the plains, people strongly individualized and yet one not more than t'other, all measuring up to the same standard of extremely human feelings and failings. He has given to a big state a personality-in a sense his own person

ality because he was of its essence. By thus revealing its people to themselves, he has given them power and pride"a smiling pride," as George Ade calls it, in their own character-and something of power to throw off the poses and pretences dear to every community, and to live sincerely, without fear or shame.

It was humanity that interested him, not nature. One gets a general effect of plain fertile farming country as the background of his neighbors' lives, but he does not see details of land or sky. Perhaps those large round glasses covered visual vagueness; at any rate such a poem as Knee-deep in June expresses a general human ecstasy in a beautiful day, but it does not express that love of the earth, and identification with its forces, that intimate knowledge of every phase of earth-life which we get, for example, from John Muir's prose, and which we are beginning to feel in a few of the younger poets. Riley's interest was in human beings-yes, and in dogs and other familiar animals.

His art, like the character of the people he spoke for, was simple and direct. If it yielded often to the temptation of a too obvious sentimentality, it rose in strong moments to a poignant tenderness, or even to a veiled suggestion of heroic beauty. And always, between both extremes it was iridescent with humor-humor always gentle and tender, never grim or grotesque or sardonic.

He was, of course, to a degree unusual even among poets, a child. And out of a rare sympathy with fellow-children he was able to produce masterpieces of child-character like Little Orphant Annie, The Raggedy Man, The Bear Story